Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Photo Apps, Video, Movies, AT&T, Pageviews, Places, Credits, Growth and More
- Facebook Photos Gets Polish: White Background, Bigger Images That Load Faster
- Facebook Discontinues Deals After Failing to Make Pre-Paid Coupons Social
- Slide Confirms Game Closures, Ending a Long and Wild Journey Building Social Apps
- Miramax’s Multi-Title Movie Rental Facebook App: A Model for Content Owners
- Phrases, Friend Quizzes, Photos, Greeting Cards and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: Photo Apps, Video, Movies, AT&T, Pageviews, Places, Credits, Growth and More Posted: 26 Aug 2011 09:00 PM PDT UK Won't Ban Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion met with United Kingdom officials Thursday regarding the social networks' role in summer riots there. The government ended up not moving to restrict access to the social networks in emergencies such as riots. Facebook Takes Third Spot for Video – Facebook becomes the third largest video site on the Internet, comScore reported. That is 51.5 million people who watched videos on the platform in July. AT&T to Discontinue Facebook Phone – AT&T is reportedly set to drop its "Facebook phone" called the Status, according to TechCrunch.
Facebook Hit 1 Trillion Pageviews - Facebook surpassed 1 trillion pageviews according to Google’s Ad Planner tool, although comScore says otherwise. Facebook Mobile App to Offer Photo Filters - Facebook looks to be competing with Instagram’s classy mobile app by offering almost a dozen photo filters to its mobile own application — following Facebook’s attempt to buy the startup, according to The New York Times. News of the feature first leaked out in June. Recapping Facebook's Bug Bounty – Neal Poole did a basic rundown of Facebook's Security Bug Bounty program, which included information about multi-line JavaScript URI, redirects preserving fragment portions of URLs, XSS filters and more. Facebook Wraps Up Farm Bureau Dispute – Facebook and the Farm Bureau had a dispute over Facebook trademarking "FB," but it seems like the lawsuit is set to be wrapped up.
Milyoni Chart for Credits – Milyoni created a nice chart and whitepaper that includes ways that Facebook Credits can, and cannot, be used. Facebook to Open Second Campus - Facebook is set to open up an additional campus from its current Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The second campus pwill be southwest of the current location, to be constructed in 2013 to accommodate about 2,800 employees. Ticketmaster Allows Users to Find Friends – Line Nation's Ticketmaster service launched an app that allows users to see where their friends are sitting on seat maps and tag themselves.
BBC Does Facebook On-Demand Video – BBC has developed an on-demand Facebook application allowing users to rent episodes from the show "Top Gear" for 48 hours. ShopIgniter, Involver Partner – The two companies are entered into a partnership to help online retail businesses with a management content system. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Photos Gets Polish: White Background, Bigger Images That Load Faster Posted: 26 Aug 2011 04:38 PM PDT A brief post today by Facebook product manager Justin Shaffer describes a new version of Facebook’s photo viewer coming out now. In place of the black lightbox background window that it previously had you’ll see a much thinner white background. Meanwhile, images are getting considerably more space, going from 720 to 960 pixels., They’ll also load “twice as fast,” Shaffer writes.
For sake of comparison, newly-launched Google+’s maximum photo size is 2048 pixels. Facebook’s size increase might be designed to reduce the gap between the two. The thinner border will keep more of the previously viewed page visible, reminding users to close the photo viewer and resume browsing rather than leave Facebook altogether. By moving to from a black to a white background, opening photos from the mostly white news feed should be less jarring. This could reduce fatigue from rapidly dropping in and out of the photo viewer and keep users browsing the site for longer. The photos product has been one of Facebook’s key draws since the early years. Today, in a new stat revealed in the blog post, the company says it’s getting 250 million uploads a day, or about one photo for every three users on Facebook. The upgrade will be rolled out over the next few week, and should make Facebook Photos even more of an attraction for sharing and viewing.
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| Facebook Discontinues Deals After Failing to Make Pre-Paid Coupons Social Posted: 26 Aug 2011 04:28 PM PDT Facebook has told Reuters that it plans to discontinue its pre-paid coupon service. “After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” the company said. Groupon, LivingSocial, and Google Offers may breathe a little easier this weekend. At first, expectations were high for Deals, as Facebook could have leveraged its enormous user base, various communication channels, and payment system Credits to help the product gain traction. However, it appears tests in eight cities did not prove that users wanted Deals or that the product, as it was, fit the social network
Facebook never put its full might behind Deals. It initially injected stories into the news feed asking users to sign up for the service, and later promoted the pre-paid offers with emails and real estate in the sidebar. Still, Facebook apparently chose to hedge its bets and watch how users reacted rather than initiating flashier promotions or bombarding the news feed. Just last month, Facebook added Charlotte, St. Louis, and Minneapolis to the original test cities, San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Austin and Atlanta. This might have been an effort to see if cities less prone to early adoption that might not have already been satisfied by established daily deals services such as Groupon would respond better. Apparently not. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses,” Facebook said in the statement. “We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.” In past reviews of the product, we criticized Deals regarding the quality of the experiences offered , the sometimes shallow discounts, and the way the experiences were ptiched to users. Had Facebook subsidized businesses to provide deeper discounts on attractive experiences, and came up with a more compelling design for the Deals-browsing app, the results of the tests might have been different.
The market also may have simply been over-saturated with daily deals after waves of Groupon clones flooded in seeking the business’ big margins. Facebook didn’t seem to figure out how to get users actively discussing Deals and recruiting friends in the same place they could buy them — what could have been a crucial differentiator. Facebook’s foot traffic incentive system, Checkin Deals, which actually pre-dated Deals and used to have its name, will continue to run. The announcement comes as other web services are deadpooling products that haven’t met expectations or don’t fit. Google announced it would dissolve Slide and drop most of its products including the recently launched Photovine. Gowalla also said it would strip out the Notes and Items features from its location service. Facebook earlier this week confirmed with us it would scrap the Places check-in feed and map as it moves towards applying location as a layer to all posted content. The discontinuations might signal Facebook is looking to focus more as it tries to fend off advances of Google+. Or that it has something new in store for helping local business converts fans into customers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Slide Confirms Game Closures, Ending a Long and Wild Journey Building Social Apps Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:02 PM PDT
It will also be remembered for how it didn’t quite hit the key part of the trend at the right time as the industry evolved. Zynga instead cornered a big portion of social gaming, and is now heading towards an initial public offering worth billions.
After being acquired by Google in 2010 for more than $182 million, Slide initially seemed poised for a second wind (or more like a fourth wind) helping to lead the creation of a product to go against Facebook. Instead, some of the team continued running SuperPoke and other apps — it still has nearly half a million monthly active users on Facebook — or worked on new ones like photo-sharing mobile app Photovine. Those efforts were more on the peripheral of Google+ products, if not in competition with them. Tellingly, Slide’s games weren’t even included in its games launch earlier this month. So, it’s not all that surprising that Slide announced to the company yesterday that it would be shutting down almost all of its apps. AllThingsD, which broke the story, also reported that founder Max Levchin is leaving, and so is up-and-coming product leader Jared Fliesler, who will join fellow former Slide executive Keith Rabois at mobile payments company Square.
This still isn’t a failed acquisition in the way that other recent big ones have been, like Cisco’s closure of its Flip device line. Most Slide employees are staying to work in other parts of the acquirer, and we’ve heard that attrition to date has already been very low. And because Google is busy hiring anyway, including for its game platforms and social products, these 100-some veteran employees are still in a good position to make an impact. A Look Back at Slide’s Products Over the YearsThe company began life as a desktop photo browser app back in 2005, but quickly transitioned to take advantage of MySpace. It built an online photo app of sorts that users could embed in their profiles. To get a sense of how early this was in the industry, MySpace sometimes viewed third-party developers as threats and at various points tried to block their embeds. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Miramax’s Multi-Title Movie Rental Facebook App: A Model for Content Owners Posted: 26 Aug 2011 12:20 PM PDT Miramax film studios released a multi-title movie rental app this week that lets users stream any of 20 films for 48 hours in exchange for 30 Facebook Credits. Users can also earn behind the scenes clips by assigning friend’s to roles in films via wall posts. The Miramax eXperience app, powered by Ooyala’s video technology, lacks some of the advanced social features such as timed comments and scene sharing found in Milyoni’s film rental app. However, the destination app is special because it aggregates a catalog of films rather than only serving one, and could become a model copied by other content owners including TV networks and record labels as well as other film studios.
The film studio originally planned to host the video on demand storefront on Miramax.com, but CEO Mike Lang told PaidContent the Facebook app was an attempt fish where the fish are. The app is now available with 20 films in the US, and 10 in the UK and Turkey. Purchased films can also be watched through the browser of an iPad or on Google TV. Eventually, Miramax will look to sell fil Apps allowing users to pay for access to digital media content have sprung up this year, with Milyoni pioneering the space with its Social Theater app for The Dark Knight in March. Credits-for-content apps appeal to media producers because they allow them to generate a direct return on their social media investment rather than just conducting institutional marketing. Milyoni publishes differently skinned versions of it’s app for each film reducing the likelihood of a single user making multiple purchases. However, the new social features in Social Theater 2.0, including the abilities publish video clips of currently watched scenes to the news feed and leave comments pegged to specific moments in a film, are superior to those in Miramax eXperience. When users first visit Miramax’s app, they can slide between 20 popular films from the studio’s catalog including Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. Rentals cost 30 Facebook Credits, or $3, per film for 30 days with a 48 hour streaming period. These are almost identical terms to Milyoni’s app. The Ooyala video player runs smoothly, automatically optimizing for definition though users can also select video quality level. While watching users can share the app via Like and Send buttons, or by leaving a comment and opting to post it to Facebook. However, the stories posted by these social plugins aren’t likely to attract many users since they don’t cite the currently viewed film and therefore appear quite boring. The addition of live chat or timed comments, scene sharing, and richer social plugin shares could significantly increase virality, and give users a reason to rent through the app rather than elsewhere.
Some of this missed opportunity for growth will likely be made up by Casting Call, Miramax eXperience’s embedded sharing app. Users are shown popular characters from Miramax films, asked to “cast” a friend in the role. A publisher dialog encourages users to share their casting selection to the friend’s wall. To comply with Facebook’s policies against incentivized sharing, users are reward with a behind-the-scenes clip of a film of their choice for casting three friends whether they publish the wall stories or not.
By taking a multi-title approach, Miramax can translate positive encounters with its app into additional sales better than standalone Facebook apps for each film. Plus, since Miramax eXperience is linked to from the Pages of all the films it serves, there’s little lose and much to gain by offering a wide variety of content in a single app. Don’t be surprised if you soon see record labels bundling music by different artists or TV networks offering a slate of their shows in aggregated Credits-for-content Facebook apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 26 Aug 2011 10:20 AM PDT
The apps on our list grew from between 209,400 and 707,600 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define “emerging” applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Top Gainers This Week
Phrases (new) grew by 707,600 MAU this week, as mentioned, it's not available in the US. Then there were friend apps. Friend Report Card publishes a "report card" of your friends, tagging them in the photo, consequently growing by 668,800 MAU this week. Te Atrevez A Kontesta grew by 380,200 MAU and is a Spanish friend quiz publishing questions and answers to the stream; the Polish version seems to be Bolesna prawda with 272,00 MAU and the German version Warheiitsspiiel with 238,500 MAU. O-Meter App Factory is an app that grew by 318,000 MAU and is a series of applications and quizzes.
Photo apps now included Photos + with 649,600 MAU and Animated Picture that makes an animated gif for your profile photo with 209,400 MAU. Greeting card apps popular in non-US markets this week were Kad Raya with 346,800 MAU (Islam-themed greeting cards published to the stream) and Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya with 302,000 MAU (ditto). How Happy are You Today grew by 297,000 MAU and publishes a percentage of happiness to your stream daily and Then there was some sort of integration with Amazon Sweepstakes that grew by 261,100 MAU and a car contest of some sorts, Vi un Fiesta.move with 213,700 MAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
Places More Popular Than Foursquare – London developer Golden Gekko 
Some social gamers are going to miss 
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